Paperboy (26 page)

‘Good country air will do that,’ he explained proudly, as if he knew anything about it. ‘You need toughening up. People around here have damp sheets all the time.’

‘Then why on earth don’t they move somewhere nicer?’ I tried lying down on the bed, and found that the gas mantle was frighteningly close to my head. I knew there was a hotel near by, full of varnished teak, soft yellow lighting and brass ship’s fittings, where the landlady was serving prawn cocktails in little metal cups. I also knew that Bill did not consider hotels to be for the likes of him, and wouldn’t dream of staying in one.

Many years later, Steven had to drive around the West Country on business, and insisted on taking Bill with him. The weather was foul when they arrived in Torquay, and Steven was running late for a meeting. Dropping our father on the steps of the nearest hotel, he told him to head for the bar, where he would pick him up in an hour’s time. When he returned after the meeting, he found Bill standing forlornly on the steps where he had been deposited, soaked to the bone. He had been too embarrassed to enter the foyer.

I did not understand this, because here was a man who always looked immaculate in his grey suit, white shirt, grey silk tie and polished black Oxford toecaps, who did not own jeans or plimsolls, who even wore his suit on the beach. The idea of him coming on holiday to sit smartly upright behind the folding table of the world’s smallest, cheapest caravan in the ugliest part of the British Isles outside of Canvey Island (another regular holiday
destination)
made no sense at all. Many men of Bill’s age regarded a smart suit as a sign of respect and class, but even if he had been born fifty years later he would not have considered three-quarter-length camouflage trousers, trainers and a sleeveless top to be suitable apparel for a father.

I was angry with him for two reasons: his unthinking cruelties to my mother, and his determination to transform me into some kind of motor mechanic by having me climb underneath cars, bikes and now the caravan to hold a bolt in place or ‘press hard on that until there’s nothing leaking out’, because I always did the wrong thing and got oil everywhere. I knew I was meant to be thinking about grommets and differentials, but instead I’d be worrying whether Dickens had got the train signals wrong in
Our Mutual Friend
. My lack of concentration on the job at hand would lead to a yell from above, a shower of petrol/ oil/unidentified green liquid and a thump round the back of the head, along with an exhortation to ‘Go away and read something, for God’s sake, you’re bloody useless.’

One miserable Sunday, I spent the entire afternoon holding up one end of the caravan so my father could make a wooden chock to fit beneath the wheels. When my attention slipped and I allowed the end to slide from my grasp, everything inside tilted over and smashed. Bill screamed blue murder, because his hand had become trapped in the process.

‘Where’s your strength?’ he yelled, clutching his hand. ‘You can’t do anything. Flesh and blood? You’re as dry as those bloody books you’re always reading. You’re just made of paper. I’m amazed you don’t curl up and bloody blow away.’

There was a small plywood shelf in the caravan, and I quickly filled it with so many paperbacks that it came away from the wall. Reading prevented me from
participation;
for the rest of the family it must have been like having to lug an embalmed corpse around on holiday, from the miniature railway to the pier to the beach. The only time I remember speaking in anything approaching a connected sentence was to ask a question about Yosarian in Heller’s
Catch-22
, forgetting that no one was remotely interested.

Recently, I read that children’s brains hardwire themselves differently the moment they hit their teen years. The physical structure and layout changes, making teenagers more reflective and self-aware, but it also stops them from interpreting the facial emotions of others, creating a cognitive gap between them and adults. I had always selfishly thought that my parents were unresponsive to my needs, but it turns out they were being perfectly normal.

Even without this knowledge I resolved to be nicer, to help repair the leaking caravan, motorbike and car, to do chores around the house, stop reading, stop imagining, start being a better son. In brief, it was time to put away childish things and become a man.

But Kath hated the caravan as much as I did, and a fresh fault-line was developing through the family that sided Steven (practical, mechanical) with our father, and I (dreamy, vague) with our mother. Kath handled the ban on imagination by reading and going to see movies on the sly, but she was not allowed out alone unless she was working, so various subterfuges were used. She would ‘take Chris to visit a sick friend’ if she wanted to get to the cinema, or develop a headache that required her to spend the evening in her bedroom, where she would read. Even then, Bill couldn’t resist looking in from time to time, so she had to be careful. He followed her everywhere, issuing warnings, unable to see how much he needed her.

Meanwhile, I was illicitly sliding the typewriter from
beneath
my bed when no one was looking and tapping out stories in faint print, so that I would not have to make a noise with the keys. I could not have been more furtive if I had been bottling my own gin from a homemade still.

The pair of us were behaving like spies, mother and son, tangling ourselves in such complex webs of deceit that Bill must have thought his wife was having an affair. He was now the enemy of freedom, the head of the thought police, and as I was reading Orwell’s
1984
at the time, I became Winston Smith, quickly learning how to hide my rebellious traits in case I awoke one morning to hear my father intoning ‘You are the dead’ out of the caravan’s gas mantle.

The lies just kept on compounding themselves, until I could not be trusted to catch my mother’s eye over the dinner table, in case I accidentally gave something away. We looked out for each other, stepping on unguarded conversations, creating alibis and cover stories, always ready to jump in with a dozen barely plausible excuses. Sometimes neighbours were roped into this complicity, and even the dog was enlisted on a couple of occasions with false visits to the PDSA and some protracted explanation involving distemper, the only animal illness Kath had been able to recall.

There was one good thing about being stranded in a caravan in a filthy field, and that was the farmer’s house, because the old man let us watch his television. This was where I first came across re-runs of
The Quatermass Experiment
, whose hero was a grumpy, unlikeable professor attached to the government in some capacity as a space scientist. The stories showed a great mistrust of being instructed from above, as government yes-men told Quatermass that they knew what they were doing, creating artificial foodstuffs (probably Fanny Cradock’s boiled-egg colouring) when in fact the entire country was
being
flogged off to alien forces. It was science fiction, but the series actually seemed to foresee the Thatcher era. Professor Quatermass remained a great English anti-hero, not just because he was shabby and unstarlike, but because he displayed a consistent suspicion of authoritarianism when most male icons were themselves authoritarians.

I outstayed my welcome in the farmer’s house, and was eventually banned from the telly room for getting overexcited. I took my revenge by flying a kite threaded with pieces of silver paper from Bill’s fag packets over the farmer’s roof, in order to muck up the old man’s television reception.

There wasn’t much else to do near the caravan site except bring down sparrows with the aid of a thick elastic band and a box of mothballs. Bill owned an old Bolex cine-camera, but it was kept locked in a box underneath packets of silica, and was never used in case it got damaged. Valuable, attractive or interesting items were never used in the Fowler household; they remained in their original boxes where no harm could befall them. I would have liked to make an action film that involved tying my brother to the tracks of the miniature railway. Steven was happy to do it, and was trusting enough to assume that he would be untied before the train got there.

Around this time, my mother did something extraordinarily weird. Faced with the prospect of yet another week staring at the rain-darkened ceiling of the caravan from her damp single bunk, Kath vanished.

No one knew where she had gone. One minute she was there, and the next she wasn’t. Her little suitcase was missing. It was the first and only time she ever did such a thing in half a century of marriage. She disappeared for precisely one week, and, like Agatha Christie before her, refused to talk about where she had been when she returned.

While she was away, the rest of us were obliged to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Bill never mentioned the subject, and quietly set about getting his own tea. It was as if Kath had been abducted by Quartermass’s aliens and they had wiped her memory from our brains.

When she came back the following Sunday, she headed to her room to unpack her case, then came downstairs to prepare tea (sponge cake, banana trifle), acting as if nothing untoward had occurred.

In theory, given that Bill had been unable to acknowledge her absence, we could simply have picked up where we had left off and gone on as before. Bill refused to speak to her, however, and went to his mother’s house, where he stayed for several weeks. Steven and I assumed that our mother had gone to stay in Brighton, where horrible ‘Aunt’ Mary, our maternal grandmother’s paid companion, still had a flat. The thought that she might have nipped off somewhere exotic for a mad fling never crossed our minds.

Some while after Kath returned, an investigative rootle through her jewellery box provided me with a clue to where she had been. Beneath her fake pearls I found a small red enamel pin – the symbol of the Russian communist party. It transpired that she had fulfilled a childhood dream to visit the Hermitage in St Petersburg, staying alone in a government hotel on a non-existent budget. Eventually excitement got the better of her, and she came to speak of the wonders she had seen there, but only quietly, when my father was out of the room. She had pawned her mother’s ring to pay for the flight.

Shortly after she returned, Bill got the message and sold the caravan.

25

Certificate X

THE FAMILY HAD
lined up on either side of the trench, with Bill and Mrs Fowler firing shots from one side, Kath and I sending up flares from the other, Steven slowly being annexed by my father, and Grandfather William operating as Switzerland, somewhere in the middle where we could both go and hide. My valiant effort to lie on my back holding a monkey wrench without thinking of Winston Smith’s betrayal of Julia in
1984
had failed miserably, and I was forced to concede that the problem of growing up with imagination in a relentlessly sensible household would not go away.

Although we hardly ever had cross words, I could see that Steven was very different to me. Easy-going and naturally practical, he hid his anxieties so well that for many years I failed to realize he had braved a nightmarish time at school.

Sensing that I was being increasingly annoying, I decided that I needed to involve Bill, to make him see my point of view. My father freely admitted to having no interest in books, little taste in films and actively
detesting
the theatre, but the door had been left ajar in one area. Apparently, like my mother, he enjoyed horror stories.

It turned out that the book of
The Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told
had belonged to him, not to Kath. I had never seen a proper horror film and was underage to do so (the ‘X’ certificate at the time being for over-sixteens), but I now worked on getting Bill to smuggle me into the cinema, which appealed to him because it was illegal and therefore somehow a manly thing to do. And if I could get my mother to come along too, we would all have something to talk about.

Close, it turned out, but no cigar. My father would concede to the horror double bill, but not if it involved bringing Kath along; he was still punishing her for the St Petersburg jaunt, and thought it was ‘unladylike’ for a woman to enjoy being scared, although by now he had scared her quite a few times himself.

We went through the local paper and I chose the most lurid Hammer double bill I could find. The first horror film I shared with my father created a bond that was certainly never there before.

‘You probably want to get rid of your school cap for the evening,’ he said, ‘and put on some long trousers, for God’s sake. If anyone asks, you’re sixteen but you’ve been sick. I don’t want you showing me up.’

Luckily I was gangly and already taller than my father. I just needed to find clothes that didn’t make me look twelve years old, so the standard-issue grey and yellow school jumper was out. As I clumped up the steps of the cinema, I couldn’t have felt more self-conscious if I had been balancing on someone’s shoulders inside a double-height raincoat. But it was worth the effort to finally see a film bearing the forbidden, mysterious ‘X’ certificate.